We have made a number of changes to this year’s report, including two new chapters. The first is on Promoting and Protecting Human Rights through the UN, and describes our work on human rights through the UN – the forum in which the UK seeks to promote a coordinated response to human rights violations from the international community. The second is on our Human Rights and Democracy Programme, an important source of funding that allows us to support hundreds of human-rights-related projects around the world.

Another innovation to this year’s report is a new section on the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (PSVI), which I launched in May. The aim of this initiative is to strengthen and coordinate international efforts to prevent and respond to atrocities involving sexual violence, and to break down the culture of impunity around such crimes. We have included details of the work we have undertaken so far on PSVI, as well as a case study on the first deployment of a UK team of experts to the Syrian border to document abuses and provide essential training.

This year we have taken a fresh look at our methodology for including states in the Countries of Concern section. The new methodology will ensure that our criteria remain robust, particularly in response to the interest that the Foreign Affairs Committee and members of my Advisory Group on Human Rights have shown in this section. The primary factor in our consideration remains the overall human rights situation in a country. But we also take into account how well the UK is placed to work for change. As a result of this analysis, we retained 27 of the 28 countries highlighted in 2011, dropping only Chad.

Having begun his career in academic libraries, Adrian Janes has subsequently worked extensively in public libraries, chiefly in enquiry work as an Information Services librarian. In this role he has had particular responsibility for information from both the UK Government and the European Union. He wrote a detailed report on sources for the latter which was published by FreePint in 2007, and has contributed articles to FreePint and ResourceShelf. He is involved in training in information literacy and the use of online reference resources.

A Contributing Editor to DocuTicker, he also write reviews for Pennyblackmusic.

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